This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
More wireless, mobile devices are able to download or stream video, and this trend appears to be increasing. A radio access network serving many mobile devices ideally would be able to handle all of the video being requested by these devices. However, as the number of mobile devices increases and video remains popular, radio access networks may not be able to deliver all of the requested video as efficiently as possible.
A service entity such as media optimizer (MO) and video servers use corresponding video protocols used to optimize video downloading provide powerful techniques for significantly increasing system capacity and video quality. In particular, if the service entities provide more video to the radio access network, well in advance (e.g., seconds) of when that video will likely be downloaded or required by a mobile device, this enables the radio access network to quickly exploit any short term improvement in radio frequency (RF) conditions or loading. That is, the radio access network can send additional video to mobile devices because of the short term improvement.
If the service entities provide more video than strictly required to the radio access network, this tends to prevent flexibility of the radio access network in quickly adapting the best possible level of video compression and video frame type on shorter timescales, e.g., based on anticipated future system loading, packet loss (e.g., if significant packet loss, then additional compression may be appropriate when a packet is retransmitted by radio link control), user media selection such as fast-forward, or video abandonment by user. This tends to result in more packet loss at the radio access network, e.g., when radio access network memory is exhausted.
Thus, it difficult to achieve the benefits of having more video at the radio access network while avoiding the detriments to having more video.